What the case record does not show is the dramatic concealment of popular crime narrative. DeAngelo did not create an elaborate false identity, systematically destroy evidence, or operate through extraordinary subtlety. He lived his life. He worked. He had a family. He did not appear to be hiding, in any dramatic sense, in the years after the crimes stopped.
The concealment was not his achievement alone; it was also a function of the investigative tools available. Without the genealogy database approach — which itself required specific technical and demographic conditions to be useful — there is no clear path by which a 1970s or 1980s investigation would have identified him. He did not make mistakes that a competent contemporary investigation could have caught. He avoided the criminal justice system. And the criminal justice system did not have, in those decades, a method that could have connected him to the crime-scene evidence without his being in its databases.
## The Families Who Didn’t Get to Hear the Plea
Not every person affected by the documented crimes was alive to see Joseph DeAngelo enter his guilty plea or to hear his sentence imposed. The decades between 1974 and 2018 were long enough that the case’s resolution came after the deaths of some who had waited for it.
David Witthuhn, whose wife Manuela was killed in 1981 in Irvine, died in 2018, the same year as DeAngelo’s arrest. He had been involved in advocacy for the case for years and had spoken publicly about his hope that the case would eventually be resolved. He did not live to see the plea or the sentencing.